The Pope is a Charlatan

Imagine being on the board of a huge, ancient, and corrupt international conglomerate that is perceived around the world as hypocritical, greedy, perverted, and scandal-ridden—a company peddling an outmoded product and losing customers in droves.

What would you do?

Maybe launch a new marketing campaign to change your image?

From the people who've brought us centuries of war, hypocrisy, and ignorance—not to mention the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazi "neutrality" of World War II, and the worldwide clusterfk generated by revelations of molestation and institutional complicity—comes the new face of the Roman Catholic Church: Pope Francis.

Kinder and more understanding—the human symbol of a church heading steadfastly toward a new age.

He tweets! He Facebooks! He uses Instagram and YouTube! He's friendly-looking and kind of loose-tongued! Having named himself after the patron saint of the poor, he's forsaken some of the traditional Vatican trappings: no more red loafers or ermine cape, no more Popemobile inside Vatican City, no more palatial Vatican apartment. He moved Andrew Sullivan, the sometimes-bellicose pundit (gay and inexplicably Catholic), to tears when he said gays were fine with him as long as they didn't have sex—which is the real sin.

Pope Francis is trending. The media love him. Wow, ain't this new guy cool? Everything is different now, right?

I guess we don't remember that John Paul II too was known as a man of the people, a change agent, a rock star even. He was credited with helping Solidarity leader Lech Walesa to bring down communism with his "peaceful revolution" in Poland. He's the reason they made the Popemobile in the first place—so he could be closer to the people without fear of assassination. Had there been Twitter at the time, I'm sure he would have used it.

And yet look where the church ended up after J.P. II and his successor Benedict XVI: maligned, disgraced, a lot poorer after paying so many abuse settlements, and pretty much irrelevant, except to the followers who persist in chaining themselves to its ancient dogma.

It will probably take more than a shiny new figurehead to fix that kind of damage. Francis might seem cuddly to the progressive Internet masses—most of whom aren't Catholic anyway—but people who study this sort of thing suspect more sizzle than steak.

New York Times op-ed contributor Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic, noted in a recent column that while Francis's persona is aggressively aimed at connecting with "a world that often tuned out his predecessors," it represents more of a strategic shift than a doctrinal one.

"So far," Douthat wrote, "he has at least gained the world's attention. The question is whether that attention will translate into real interest in the pope's underlying religious message or whether the culture will simply claim him for its own—finally, a pope who doesn't harsh our buzz!—without being inspired to actually consider Christianity anew."

Impeding that effort, naturally, is the fact that the new underlying message is the same as the old underlying message. It's just being obscured by the pope's more amiable tone.

In a widely quoted essay in the New Republic, religious scholar Damon Linker wrote, "When progressive Catholics pine for change, they mostly mean that they want to see the church brought into conformity with the egalitarian ethos of modern liberalism, including its embrace of gay rights, sexual freedom, and gender equality. And that simply isn't going to happen. To hope or expect otherwise is to misread this pope, misinterpret the legacy of his predecessors, and misunderstand the calcified structure of the church itself."

Clearly Pope Francis represents a step in a direction many progressive Catholics (and progressives of every religion) would like to see—a sort of greener, more modern, cable-TV version of Catholicism, one that includes birth control, abortion, homosexuality, women's rights, and female and married priests. A religion with less of a tendency to oppress the ignorant with backward dogma and threats of eternal damnation.

But in every case where Francis has reached out to those who disagree with him, Linker points out, "he has done so while indicating that his own beliefs grow out of Catholic bedrock."

In a way, Pope Francis makes me think of Barack Obama (the first president to insist on having his own cell phone). A good man with some good ideas, a solid choice for office, a fresh face.

But only a face. Not a revolution.

If you go a little deeper than 140 characters, you'll see that nothing has changed.

And likely nothing will.

ALSO: More about the Pope, including his chances on changing the church (or of being a fraud), the woman who almost changed his mind, and even some blessed booze, here.

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